


Kudan

by draculard



Category: Nijigahara Holograph
Genre: Body Horror, Bugs & Insects, Father/Daughter Incest, Gen, Horror, Human/Animal Hybrids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 10:49:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18386915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: A cow with a human face is born when the sun is high and hot.





	Kudan

A calf is born with a human face in an empty field when the sun is high in the sky. Its nose is flat, its lips thin; its eyes are blue and milky. Its mother is an ordinary cow, and she wanders away before it can feed for the first time.

The sun goes down. The calf is still there. It turns its human face up toward the stars, and with no one around to hear its message, it dies.

From between its thin, pink lips comes a glowing cabbage butterfly.

* * *

Arie is three years old the first time her father rapes her. It becomes her first memory; the summer sun beating down on bare shoulders, the hot, dry wind ruffling her hair, the singing of cicadas in the grass, mere inches away.

She can hear the water trickling through Nijigahara Tunnel as he enters her for the first time. Her flesh tears and stings and she cries about it silently, with her face buried in her arms, and she can smell her own skin, where a day’s worth of grass stains and sweat and earth have gathered.

He can barely fit himself inside her. The tip of his penis jabs into her and slips out, again and again, but Father does nothing to fix it. He seems happy with what he can get, and Arie does everything she can to ignore it, to focus on the things she’ll do when he’s done.

She’ll get her rubber ball and toss it in the air, up and down, chasing it whenever the wind blows it away.

She’ll find her box of colored chalk and bring it to the tunnel and draw pictures of the sun and trees on the cement wall.

She’ll fill a bottle up with dish soap and use her old plastic bubble wand to blow as many big, translucent spheres as she wants, and she’ll watch the light shine through them to make rainbows, and she’ll hold her hand out palm up, so the bubbles will float down and burst against her skin.

But for now she has to get through this. Tears dried, she raises her head and rests her chin on her forearms, her body jerking back and forth with every thrust from Father. In the backyard, unmowed and full of weeds, a cabbage butterfly lands on a dandelion and flutters its wings.

* * *

Kohta dreams he is a boy again, stealing cigarettes and shot-sized bottles of sake from the corner store. He doesn’t like the taste of either, but he sits in the mouth of Nijigahara Tunnel and sips the sake and chain-smokes through an entire pack of cigarettes, coughing with his eyes open every time it burns his lungs.

Behind him is the darkness of the tunnel. Before him is the brightness of a spring field, with grass sprouting up in green tufts and little purple flowers hugging the earth.

He wishes Arie was here. He wishes he could hear her story again. He can’t remember the details, but he knows he wants to; he wants to know all about the monster in the tunnel, the monster behind him right now, the monster staring at his unsuspecting back and eyeing every puff of smoke.

It could reach out and grab him at any time, but it doesn’t. He wishes it wound.

Kohta swigs the last of the sake and coughs when it burns his throat, and then he takes a drag on the cigarette and coughs again, and suddenly it’s all too much. His throat burns, his lungs burn, his entire body burns, and he hacks and wheezes until he thinks he might cough up blood.

But it’s not blood that comes up. He feels six tiny legs the size of a single hair crawling up his esophagus; he feels the flutter of wings against the roof of his mouth. And when Kohta coughs again, his lips part and he feels the thick, furry body of a butterfly fly out between his teeth.

He watches it go, a tiny, white thing, its wings catching the wind.

* * *

A calf with a human face is born in the middle of an empty field, when the sun is gone and the stars are bright, and the wind is far too cold. Its mother moves away from it as soon as it’s free, and leaves it there slick with blood, unable to fend for itself.

It draws breath through human nostrils. It licks its lips with a human tongue.

There is no one around to hear its message. In the morning, when the farmers come, it will be dead, and they will throw its body down the river, where it will float and slough its skin until it ends up with the others at the end of the road.

High above it is the third-brightest star in the sky, the horn of the Blue Dragon, the star that signals the start of the lunar year. Perhaps, thinks the cow, when it is floating dead in the river, the butterflies will come and consume it. Perhaps it will join its brothers as nothing more than a skeleton, the skeleton of a cow with its face bashed in, an unspecified anatomical anomaly with no particular mythology surrounding it, with no obligation to tell the future, with no obligation to open its human mouth and tell all the horrible things it sees.

It sees a mass of butterflies eating humans alive.

It sees a girl raped by her father. It sees a boy living knee-deep in murky water, with blood on his shirt and a flawed brain.

It sees a tunnel.

It sees a well.


End file.
